Queens of the sea
Today’s queens of the sea are giant merchant ships that carry trade
goods all over the world. Compared to these giants, the ships of the
ancient Phoenician traders would look like tiny rowboats!
The Phoenician traders would be amazed if they could see how modern
merchant ships are loaded. Big cranes and derricks swing out over the
side of the ship to lift the cargo aboard. On some kinds of ships,
hundreds of cars and trucks can be driven up a ramp and through large
openings in the ship’s side.
Many merchant ships of today are the kind called container ships. Cargo
of all kinds is loaded into large, metal containers. These containers
are then neatly stacked, side by side and on top of each other. The
largest container ships are about seven hundred feet (210 meters) long.
They can carry more than a thousand containers.
Cargoes of liquid, such as oil, are carried in huge ships called
tankers. The largest of these, sometimes called supertankers, are about
a quarter of a mile (four-tenths of a kilometer) long and almost as wide
as a twenty-lane highway. The inside of a tanker is like a big ice cube
tray, each square filled with oil.
Until recently, the \”queens of the sea” were big passenger liners.
These ships were like floating hotels that carried hundreds of people
across the sea. Now, most people prefer to travel by airplane. But many
passenger liners are still in use, making short cruises for people who
enjoy a sea voyage.
The deck of this supertanker is longer than four football fields.
